Monday, March 22, 2010

I was going to write my D is for. . . entry about the lovely blog DaddyLikey; it's author, Winona, writes haiku about chlamydia. Her weekly feature "Don't Showcha your Chocha" is a highlight of my working life.

But.

There's been something kind of brooding over me the last few months. It's hard to describe. Okay, it's not. It's this:

Yeah. A giant Canada goose decoy. That's what I see when I look out my office window. I thought nothing could be worse than the neighbor's giant satellite dish, but, man, was I wrong. That thing just gives me the creeps.

If I had made a collage when I began this writer’s life, it would have featured the following:AbsintheRed velvet armchairCigarettesRemington typewriterKerouacFrancoise HardyBlack eyelinerIstanbulOrnate jewelry of unknown provenanceHeavy glass bottles of dusky perfume

I’m just riffing here, but that’s the kind of thing I would have pasted on my walls to serve as inspiration. What I was aiming at. You might be able to tell that I was principally interested in being different and preferably being different in another country. Another culture.

As it turns out, I’m a well paid, sensibly attired, bottle-blonde mother of a young child and I write lies about software in suburbia. In the city in which I was born.

I’ve never seen a bottle of absinthe. Never been to Istanbul. I’ve been to the predictable places: Paris, London, Rome, Frankfurt, Los Angeles.

Edmonton.

When I stare out my window, it's at the fat back end of a fake goose nestled improbably in a small spruce tree.

I just added 2 hours to my invoice to pay for the funeral of my dreams.

Not the funeral that I always dreamed about, but the funeral of what I always dreamed about.